With Oracle coming Soon(TM) I figured I’d make a post about some counters so you all don’t get roflstomped by competent Oracle players. This won’t be an advanced guide on how to best play against the hero, neutralize his strengths, and take advantage of his weaknesses (although I might make a post about that later). Rather, this will be a more straightforward list of heroes that do well and are easy to execute.

Timbersaw

Oracle’s primary defensive combo, Ethereal+Fate’s Edict, can render himself or an ally immune to physical and magical damage for 4 seconds. The drawback is that non-orb pure damage will be amplified half again, and Timbersaw has that in spades. Oracle’s only disables are a purge/root and a disarm, neither of which are relevant to Timbersaw since he doesn’t right click and has Timber Chain.

Naga Siren

Between Fate’s Edict and False Promise, Oracle gives his team a huge advantage for a few seconds but is much less impactful when the duration is up and they are on CD. Song of the Siren neutralizes that advantage since Naga can sing and wait out those two spells, then take the fight in their short downtime. As of 6.82, strong dispels no longer remove Ensnare so if you drop it on the hero Oracle wants to FP you can largely negate the spell. Also, Oracle has no real AoE damage so he can’t deal with multiple Rad illusions at all.

Brewmaster

Very simple: Cyclone Oracle or whoever he casts FP on. (EDIT: His purge does nothing save remove the End purge from an ally. FP is non-dispellable and, except via End, neither are Edict and Flames.)

Venomancer

Poison Nova is great against Oracle for two reasons. The first is that its AoE and he can only protect one hero with Edict and one with FP. The second is that its a ton of DoT damage, which is much stronger against a target you can’t take out quickly (ie. one under FP) than burst. Also a good pusher and ganker, both of which Oracle is succeptible to.

Zeus

Zeus is one of the only heroes that’s good in lane and fights against Nerif, which is ironic since he is oriented about burst magic damage. In lane, he gets cs with Arc Lightning so the Edict disarm isn’t nearly as relevant. In a teamfight, if Oracle casts FP on a relatively high HP target they will get destroyed by Static Field. Instead of the passive getting less effective as the target takes more damage and loses HP, the hero takes large amounts of damage from it since their HP stays the same for the duration of FP.

Razor

Neutralize FP by using Static Link on them. They have to run, losing out on duration, or stay, losing out on damage. Oracle’s spells are all single target, so Unstable Current will do a lot of work. Agh’s Razor is also very good at pushing towers, which Oracle is susceptible to.